On Fri, 19 Aug 2022 at 19:19:25 +0200, Andrea Pappacoda wrote:
> > And if KDE Muon is indeed dead, simply having a "Conflicts: muon" and
> > using the same path should be ok as well?
>
> I had the same idea, even if it is not extremely elegant. But Paul doesn't
> seem to agree; why?
I'm not Paul, but I suspect he was looking at Policy §10.1:
Two different packages must not install programs with different
functionality but with the same filenames. (The case of two programs
having the same functionality but different implementations is
handled via “alternatives” or the “Conflicts” mechanism [...].)
implying that alternatives and Conflicts are the wrong tool if the two
programs have different functionality (which an alternative to Meson
and an alternative to Synaptic certainly do).
KDE Muon might be dead upstream (or not, today was the first time I was
aware of it), but it's in Debian stable, testing and unstable as of today.
Please talk to its maintainers, the Qt/KDE team, if you think Debian
would be better without (KDE's) Muon than with it.
I'm not aware of a specific rule for how long a package or executable
name needs to be not-in-Debian before that name can be reused, but from a
least-astonishment point of view, it would seem reasonable to me to want
to have at least one stable release that didn't include /usr/bin/muon
before recycling that name in PATH for Meson-compatible muon.
smcv
